Page 4 - THE CHURCH BEFORE THE MOCKING WORLD

CHAPTER ONE
Between A Rock And A Hard Place
The term liminality has been used for just under 100 years to describe the state or condition of a person who is in the transition or holding pattern in the midst of a ritual or rite of passage. Its genesis was in the writing of the anthropologist, Arnold van Gennep, who developed the concept as a folklorist and early social theorist.
In the latter part of the 20thCentury the idea was developed and expanded upon by social scientists, especially Victor Turner, who then projected the ideas to be applicable to social constructions as well as individuals.
The idea in short, is that at the individual level, people going through various rites of passage reach the liminal stage in which they have not yet become the person they are aiming to be, and yet they are no longer the person they once were. As a result, the person is in a sort of metaphysical limbo.
At the societal level, liminality describes a similar process. Cultures, organisations, or any social construction often cannot find their way through to the end of the process that is being sought. The word liminality, and the concept behind the word, describe much of both individual and institutional Christianity.
If you were to ask young, as well as many older Christians, to define their spiritual lives it would be described often as being caught in-between, stuck, irrelevant, or lacking in deep reality.
This causes guilt for many and simply a sense of giving up to even more. Perhaps, restless is the most simplified way of describing the spiritual lives and conditions of so many.
At the collective level, the Church Universal today is also in a liminal state. Whatever the self-definitions of the three branches of Christianity, Eastern, Western, and Protestant once were, they have now moved into the liminal state and are in a major transition on their way to becoming something completely new.
Such conditions are both pregnant with expectation of change, and are also stress-producing in terms of the removal of the familiar.
Often commentators have used terms such as Modernity and Post- Modern to describe what is going on in the realm of the sociology of religion. This is to some extent harmless, but in real terms irrelevant because the issues of liminality do not need correct observations in terms of ideas, definitions, and descriptors.